Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe says Canada’s leaders need to move past the carbon-tax debate and present alternative policies to the public for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions that can garner widespread support.
Mr. Moe’s government is leading a legal challenge against Ottawa’s carbon tax, which culminated in a courtroom battle in Regina where lawyers argued in mid-February that the federal government’s policy is undermining Canada’s constitutional order. In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Mr. Moe said that following the election of a number of provincial governments opposed to the federal carbon tax, his opposition to Ottawa is on the cusp of victory as Canadians have concluded the tax is too expensive and ineffective.
Now comes the hard part. He says politicians need to come up with plans to actually lower emissions, rather than simply debating a tax.
Mr. Moe, a year after taking over from his predecessor Brad Wall, has become the public face of the fight against the carbon tax at the centre of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate plan. The Premier leads a Prairie province that is sparsely populated and heavily dependent on carbon-intensive exports such as oil and gas. Rather than a tax, Mr. Moe has his sights set on the heavy regulation of emitters and technological solutions to curb carbon emissions.
“I think Canadians are starting to realize that a carbon tax is a policy that, albeit sounds good, is in effect too expensive for our families and our nation,” he said, speaking at his legislative office in Regina.
“It’s the wrong conversation for us to be having. We should be talking about what we can do to reduce our emissions profile in Canada, actually, as opposed to taxing Canadians; what we can do to sequester more carbon; and how we can share that innovation with other areas of the world.”
While the province is opposed to carbon taxes, it has undertaken a number of moves to curb its emissions. It’s not as simple as carbon taxes or nothing, says Mr. Moe. Saskatchewan is aiming to get half its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. Along with a plan to cut methane output from the energy sector by 30 per cent, the province has legislated standards that require its largest industrial operations to cut their emissions.
The federal carbon tax, which sets a price on emission at $20 per tonne this year before rising to $50 per tonne in 2022, is expected to be central in a federal election later this year.
“Our government is ensuring it is no longer free to pollute in Canada. This is a practical, affordable approach that is proven to work and will put more money back in peoples’ pockets,” Sabrina Kim, a spokeswoman for federal Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna, said in a statement.
Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has promised that his party will meet Canada’s Paris targets without a carbon tax. The Conservative Party did not respond to a request for comment about Mr. Scheer’s climate plan, which has yet to be publicly released, and how it will meet the agreement’s target, which calls for limiting global warming to below two degrees.
Mr. Moe was a long-time environment minister before he entered the Premier’s Office, and this debate has been one of his focuses for nearly a decade. He said he’s seen polling that shows his opposition to the carbon tax is winning. Better than polling, he says he’s seen results.
In 2018, Ontarians elected Doug Ford on a platform to cancel that province’s cap-and-trade program and Blaine Higgs become New Brunswick’s Premier on a promise to oppose the carbon tax. Albertans are expected to elect the United Conservative Party within months – UCP Leader Jason Kenney has said cancelling his province’s carbon tax will be his first priority.
Mr. Kenney has criticized the tax for failing to help get a pipeline built from Alberta to B.C. and claimed that the tax won’t have a measurable impact on the province’s emissions. A UCP spokeswoman said the party’s climate plan is still being written and Mr. Kenney will release the details closer to Alberta’s general election.
According to Trevor Tombe, an economics professor at the University of Calgary, research has shown that a carbon tax is the most cost-effective way of reducing emissions. Asking government officials to draw up regulations requiring different sectors of the economy to cut emissions is less efficient, he said, than creating a carbon price and letting the market decide which emissions are valuable and which aren’t.
Regulations can be helpful, he said, especially in circumstances where people are making illogical decisions. As an example, most Canadians would save money if they immediately threw out their incandescent bulbs and replaced them with LEDs due to energy savings, but most people wait for the bulbs to burn out first.
The greatest weakness of the carbon tax, according to Prof. Tombe is political, not economic.
“There’s an argument about the political challenge with carbon pricing: that politics will constrain the tax to be lower than it needs to be. So we should be talking about regulations, especially flexible ones that can lower emissions efficiently. Flexible regulations aren’t as efficient as carbon pricing, but the difference between them and pricing might be really small and that the small difference in efficiency might be worth avoiding the political challenge of carbon taxes,” he said of the argument. However, he said he still favours a carbon tax.
Justin Giovannetti